I knew it. We hold – $9 oops -$7 Billion (of the $9 Billion held outside of Afghanistan) of the Afghanistan goobermint’s  money and I knew this was what Biden was hinting about.

Taliban seeks pallets of cash in exchange for extending US Aug. 31 evacuation deadline

In a briefing last week, Joe Biden told inquisitive reporters that every American who wants to get out of Afghanistan would get out of Afghanistan, and he was counting on the Taliban’s “self-interest” in letting the Americans leave.

Toss that one into the bin of lies and errors coming from this Biden Afghanistan fiasco.

Turns out the Taliban has its own ideas about what its self-interest is.

Grenell, a former acting director of National Intelligence during President Trump’s administration, has been consistently accurate about what is going down at State and other government agencies during the ongoing Afghanistan fiasco, so his disturbing report is very likely accurate.

What we are seeing here is an emerging hostage situation in that country as Biden insists on pulling out by his Aug. 31 deadline, which the Taliban is holding him to, under penalty of “consequences.”  The State Department has claimed that 300 Americans are awaiting evacuation and have not made it to the Kabul airport yet.  According to this disturbing collection of reports from AT deputy editor Andrea Widburg, it’s likely more.  Her sources report that with the State Department thwarting even private efforts, they are having a hellish time getting out.

Grenell’s report demonstrates that far from having “self-interest” in seeing Americans out, the Taliban terrorists have a “self-interest” in hostage-taking hardball with Americans left behind after August 31.

It all points to heavy Iranian influence in how they’re going about in setting up their vicious regime as state-sponsored terrorists.

One, the hostage-taking as a new “religious” regime sets up power is redolent of the Iran hostage crisis of 1979 that went on for 444 days as smelly mullah-linked “students” danced around and waved guns, humiliating, torturing, and terrifying American diplomats as the pathetic Carter administration stood around helplessly for the most part and tried to negotiate their freedom.  The malevolent “student” clown show helped the mullahs consolidate their ill-gotten power and made them prestigious with all the world’s bad actors, prompting them to continue to spread terror through the region and beyond over the years.  Many of these “dirty-necked galoots,” to use the description of R. Emmett Tyrrell, have since turned up in high positions of power in the mullah regime, rewarded for their criminality.  The tyrants running Iran these days know all about the use and value of taking American hostages.

Two, the $1.7 billion wooden “pallets of cash” scandal, where the Obama administration shipped back more than $1 billion in otherwise sanctioned cash on a secret dead-of-night flight into Iran in exchange for the Iran deal with the mullahs (exposed by Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon), looks a lot like this demand from the Taliban for its own pallets-of-cash Iran-style deal.  The U.S. has frozen $7 billion in Afghan-owned hard currency, which is most of Afghanistan’s $9 billion in foreign reserves, which had been held for safety, likely in the New York Federal Reserve’s underground vaults (Treasury secretary Janet Yellen and her minions should get some credit for acting quickly on this).  The Taliban likely has the other $2 billion, which might be visible in this video of Taliban lowlifes running their fingers through the cash, each brick of cash being fondled, holding large stacks of what drug dealers call “Benjies.

They’ve got $2 billion, plus $83 billion in abandoned U.S. weaponry, and these pirates just want more.  They are, after all, in significant numbers criminals, given that their ranks were swelled by the emptying out of jails as the Afghan government collapsed.  Like the Iranians, at whose knee they must be learning, they are willing to take American hostages in order to get what they want, and they want baksheesh.

The Iranian mullahs famously hold the Afghanis in general contempt as a people, considering them hopeless barbarians, same as they hold the Azeris (“cockroaches”) and the neighboring Tajiks.  But this kind of hostage-taking and this kind of ransom-demanding takes this mullah-pioneered thievery to new heights.  More hostages, four times the money, and they’re calculating that Joe Biden is even easier to roll than Carter or Obama.

Joe Biden is entirely familiar with the one-hand-washes-the-other style of political bargaining being practiced by the Taliban now.  Democrats, and Biden in particular, play it constantly at a lower level.  Biden, who has no idea what he is doing and is failing hugely based on his inability to show any resolution, let alone stick up for America, or scare the Taliban with U.S. might,  may well go along with this hideous deal, which will make the Taliban very rich terrorists, given that he’s “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” as former CIA director Bob Gates wrote.  He’d be wrong on this one, too, to our eternal shame and to the extended consequences of which will be very ugly, indeed.